Ocean Colour Scene: The 13th Floor Interview

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1990’s Brit pop mods Ocean Colour Scene will be performing their classic album Mosely Shoals Downunder this month.  Last year marked the 20th Anniversary of the album.  As part of that commemoration, the band made the brave decision to bring the album, and the 30 year repertoire all to the Antipodes. 

Back in May, Tim Gruar put in a call to find out what band leader, Simon Fowler, thinks about being a Brit in a post-BREXIT pop world and playing an album that’s become so iconic.

As is the way with these things, the interview op comes months ahead of the show’s November billing.  Lead singer of the band, currently a 5 piece is doing a spot of shopping.

“I’m in Waitrose. Supermarket (laughs).  Yeah, that’s very rock’n’roll isn’t it?  Buying me loo paper in Stratford, home of the Bard and consumer convenience.”  That should be a song, I suggest.  “Oh, I think the Clash got there first.  Lost in a supermarket, hah!”

It was a ‘big news night’ back here in May, so my first question was of a Royal nature.  The Palace summoned up all their staff and there was a media cone of silence from the credible broadsheets.  I ask – what’s happening.  “Nah, he laughs.  It’s all a bit of nonsense.  They just announced on Radio 4 that (Prince) Phillip’s stepping down from active duty.  He’s not dead, or nuffin’, not yet.”  His Birmingham accent is still well in check.  “I mean they’ve been around since Adam and Eve.  Bless.

I mention that it’s a long time since we’re heard from them, OCS.  “Well we’ve been busy.  But of late we’re not doing much. (Guitarist) Steve Craddock is touring with Paul Weller! then with the Specials and sometimes he’s with The Beat.  And I’ve been down the pub! (Laughs again).

In the 1990s one half of the music scene was dominated by Britpop.  Emblazoned with the Union Flag, this was a deliberately encouraged ‘movement’ that mixed indie garage and ‘60’s tinged pop.  In one corner, there was the blatantly influenced Beatles wanna-be-better type like Oasis; the Asian psychedelic influenced bands like Kula Shaker; there was the ‘Northern Soul’ scene that gave us Orange Juice and Edwin Collins and then there was third revival of the Mod movement.  It was the last one that spawned the birth of many bands that followed the path carved out by the Who, then the Jam, then Paul Weller.

This is where Ocean Colour Scene come in.  A Birmingham outfit that mixed mod influence tunes with a host of other 60’s influences and some very crafty musicianship to make up a collection of top 10 albums and 17 top 40 singles.  Their ‘breakthrough’ The Riverboat Song paid penance to Oasis knocking them off the coveted no.1 slot for ever.  That was partly due to Radio 1 DJ Chris Evans who hammered the song on his TGI Friday’s show and built up momentum for the band.  Their second release The Day We Caught The Train was a mix of rave culture hedonism and down to earth optimism.

I ask Fowler about the Brit phenomena and the wave of Brit-mania and patriotism that came with the 1990’s.   We had something of of ‘swinging London’ revival, he acknowledges.  Heck, even Mike Myers was jumping on board with his Austin Powers films, trying to recapture a time when every Mini had a Union Jack on the hood.  But now days, he says, it all feels quite different.  “I don’t know if I slightly older and therefore more cynical.  With the idealism that Tony Blair brought, well, I think people feel slightly foolish.  I’m not saying that all that patriotism make us feel embarrassed or somehow led to the open racism we have sometimes but the connections to the ‘old empire’ now just feel a bit stale.  It’s an awkward time because on the one hand we still want our own identity but then we have to be part of the whole international world, too.  Just look at how multicultural London is thes days, for a start.

“I think the 1990’s was supposed to be a new ‘Age of Aquarius” for many. We were all trying to adopt the free spirit of the 60’s but we were fooling ourselves.  It was more like the “Age of Bullshit and Cocaine!”

Perhaps, I suggest, with BREXIT now the opportunity to just pop over to an exotic locations in Spain Where the band recorded their popular video, The Day We Caught The Train, may no longer be possible.

Filmed on Salvador Dali’s former estate it had a real sense other exotic but you couldn’t escape the Brit lad culture that it exuded, either.  Their third release, You’ve Got It Bad, really showed us what could be done, spinning 60’s Top of the Pops go-go dance beats and free jazz, all within a few minutes.

“That was a fun day, larking about on film.  But yes, getting back to the BREXIT thing – maybe isolationism will restrict us, as Britons.  I voted to stay in, because as a musician the oppotunities are far greater.  Who knows the future.  As my Mum says – it’ll all come out in the wash!”

The band’s big moment in the sun was their second album Moseley Shoals (1996).  This album title, was a reference to Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, the Alabama concrete bunker where everyone from the Stones to Wilson Picket had recorded, and a link to Moseley, Birmingham, where most of the band come from.

Fowler says, was a direct result of over indulging.  “The album, the material came together after writing and touring for about two years before we sat down and recorded it all in our own studio in Birmingham. That album is the sound of a band learning to record as much as developing as song writers. We’d record every day….Yes I guess having your own studio was a bit of a novelty at the time.  How put got everything together, well Christ only knows.  I wrote most of the songs.  Steve would run the sessions and check the edits.  Oscar and I had a lot of ‘stand down’,  we spent a lot of time playing table tennis – he actually got pretty quite good.

Mosley Shoals has become the definitive album for the group.  I had to ask if that’s a good thing?  “You mean an albatross (laughs).  I think we probably should have seen it as a challenge.  We launched the follow up Marching Already and it did really well but I guess Mosley Shoals was the one that announced us to the world.  We’d been together 7 years already so it was the one that broke us, got us known.  We should always claim that.”  “I think,” he continues, “that every band has one decent album in their career that they’ll be known for.  We became a proper band and no we can go tour the world, play festivals and make a living out of it. Without Moseley Shoals I don’t know what would have happened to us really. That was largely down to (radio DJ) Chris Evans. He was enormously helpful to us for playing The Riverboat Song. That’s what made us really, it’s all down to Chris and I’ll forever be grateful to him.  That toppled those OASIS bastards.  So brilliant! (Laughs).

“Touring made us, and that album proved us.  I just think that when you first start playing you want everything to sound precise and almost sound exactly like the record, whereas now we really know the blueprints and sort of make it up as we go along! I really like that spontaneity we have. We are also a lot better singers and musicians to when we started than when we were kids.”

So, finally, when you manage to get out of Waitrose, what will you be doing, I ask “(Giggle).  Back to the pub! Ha! We have a big tour at the end of the year. But I need to write, I haven’t written for a while and I really need to. Maybe Oscar and I will go out, do a few acoustic gigs.  We’ve put everything into this year so we may have bit of a quieter one next year.”

Tim Gruar

OCEAN COLOUR SCENE 2017 NEW ZEALAND TOUR

November 19: Opera House, Wellington

November 20: Powerstation, Auckland

Click here for tickets.

 

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